(Sarah A. Miller/Tyler Morning Telegraph)

VINCENT LEIBOWITZ, news@tylerpaper.com

When Tyler’s Macy’s location closes Sunday, it will leave behind a piece of artistic and corporate history.

The iconic murals that decorate the building’s façade have a long history.

The mosaics were a product of Sanger-Harris Department Stores, the company that built the Tyler Macy’s store building, which started as a Sanger-Harris then became a Foley’s.

Installed when the store was constructed in 1981, the murals on the Tyler Macy’s façade are one of three surviving Sanger-Harris mosaics in Texas. Originally, there were nine stores featuring mosaics in Texas and Oklahoma. The other surviving Sanger-Harris mosaics in Texas are on the Macy’s building at Fort Worth’s Hulen Mall and the Macy’s building at Plano’s Collin Creek Mall. But both stores are slated for closure by Macy’s.

A fourth remaining Sanger-Harris mural exists, but it is not in Texas; it is on the façade of a former Sanger-Harris store in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Sanger-Harris mosaic on the Tyler store was designed by Connie Krause Pile, an architect and the daughter of Larry Krause, whose Dallas firm, Krause and Collier, was involved with the design of the façades on all of Sanger-Harris’ expansion stores, according to materials in the Sanger-Harris Archive at the Dallas Public Library.

Although no material concerning the Tyler store exists in the Sanger-Harris Archive, Ms. Pile confirmed her father, Larry Krause, designed the Tyler store.

Although she gave up architecture to be a full-time mom and homemaker shortly after becoming a licensed architect, Ms. Pile, who lives in Idaho, also designed the mosaics at Collin Creek Mall and for the Sanger-Harris in Tulsa.

“They have kind of been lost to history,” Ms. Pile said. “I’m glad people are interested in them. They are very unique.”

Ms. Pile had little recollection of designing the mural for the Tyler store, but noted she and her father’s firm were very busy working with Sanger-Harris at the time.

Ms. Pile recalled, in order to select the tiles for the murals, her father and members of his team went to the tile works in Mexico, which was responsible for producing the tile for the mosaics. Photographs tucked away in the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas and Local History Collection’s Sanger Harris Archive show Pile (then Connie Smith) coloring in designs for murals, with her father looking on, as well as numerous photographs of the tile works that produced the tile used on many of the murals.

Ms. Pile recalled the 1-inch glass tiles on the Tyler mosaic came in sheets of about one-foot, and the mosaics were plastered to the walls in a format similar to what was done at other stores. Contemporary media accounts, and even some Sanger-Harris press releases in the Sanger-Harris Archive, refer to the post-1965 murals as being made of “Italian glass tile.”

Ms. Pile confirmed, however, only the mural on the downtown flagship store was made with Italian glass, and the remainder were made with tile from a tile works in Mexico. Handwritten documents by her father in the Sanger-Harris archive, detailing the history of the murals, confirms the use of Mexican tile.

Until early February, four Sanger-Harris murals existed in Texas, including Hulen Mall, the Tyler Macy’s, Collin Creek Mall, in Plano, and Valley View Mall, in North Dallas. Valley View’s mural was felled in early February to facilitate the demolition of the mall to make way for the large mixed-used Dallas Midtown development.

In 2016, Sanger-Harris mosaics at Six Flags Mall in Arlington met the wrecking ball. Mosaics in North Richland Hills were also demolished when that location was torn down. Sanger-Harris mosaics at the old flagship downtown Dallas location (now owned by Dallas Area Rapid Transit) have been covered or removed. Murals also are no longer part of Macy’s façades that were once Sanger-Harris stores at Southwest Center (Red Bird) Mall, in southern Dallas and Town East Mall, in Mesquite.

A representative for a potential buyer of the Macy’s building in Tyler has indicated the buyer is interested in preserving the murals or removing and selling them.

“Demolishing, without any regards for the history, probably won’t happen,” said Matthew Marshall, CCIM, a real estate broker with Drake Real Estate and Investments in Tyler, who is representing the buyer.

Neither Marshall nor CBRE in Dallas would disclose the identity of the buyer or the financial details of the contract. The property is valued at $4 million, according to the Smith County Appraisal District.